Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) is often seen as a sort of accidental artist; a man who threw off the shackles of a career in banking to pursue art at its purest and to live a life unfettered by the modernity of the Western world that surrounded him. Although Gauguin did abandon a bourgeois life with a family in France for free love and painting in Tahiti, his story as an artist is hardly as simple as that.